There are a lot of voices on the lunatic fringe helping the Republican Confederate Party celebrate Confederate History Month. Many of the groups have been chronicled by the Southern Poverty Law Center in their recent report Rage on the Right which showed how the views of these extreme hate groups are moved into the mainstream by commentators and politicians of the Wingnutopia.
Of all of these ‘respected’ mainstream voices of hate, none has been at it as long as Pat Buchanan. He is the master of mainstreaming blatantly racist rhetoric.
And to celebrate CHM he has let loose a call for a race war.
In his latest column, “New Tribe Rising?”, Buchanan calls for a dividing of America along lines of race. It is a neo-Confederate call to arms (and of course this call for a race war is Obama’s fault):
Ethnonationalism — the recognition of an embryonic people that they are different from their neighbors, and the concomitant drive to live apart — is, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote 20 years ago, a more powerful force than any ideology, be it communism, fascism or democracy. [snip]
It has happened before — and here.
In the American colonies, the evil institution of slavery, followed by a century of segregation, created out of the children of captured Africans who had little in common other than color a new people, the African-Americans, who went out and voted 24-to-one for Barack Obama. [snip]
Adversity and abuse increase the awareness of separate identity and accelerate the secession of peoples from each other. [snip]
As others have done in our multicultural and multiethnic nation, this people is beginning to assert its identity, unapologetically. [snip]
Now Southerners are proudly commemorating ancestors who fought and fell in the Lost Cause and demanding recognition of Confederate History Month. And state governors are acceding. [snip]
The imputation of racism to Tea Partiers has not intimidated or cowed them. [snip]
Why are the Tea Partiers not intimidated the way Republicans often are? Why is the charge of racism not working?
First, they do not feel the guilt of country-club Republicans.
Second, they know it to be untrue. While Tea Partiers are anti-Obama, they are also anti-Pelosi, anti-Martha Coakley and anti-Charlie Christ. The coming conflict is not so much racial as it is cultural, political and tribal.
Black America seems united. White America is the house divided, for it is in the womb of white America that this new people is gestating and fighting to be born.
Pat’s “new people’ waiting to be born are coming from the Bachman/Palin wing and have embraced their whiteness and the myths of white victimhood to form a revitalized aryan tribe–but Pat is quick to point out that this is ‘tribalism’ and not ‘racism’. I do not see the distinction, but then again I think these people are fucking assholes and Buchanan is an unrepentant white supremacist. Of course, I can only base that assessment on what these fuckers say and do .
It is not a surprise that Buchanan was there when the Southern Strategy was created. Nor is it a surprise that implementing it has been his life’s work. What is a surprise, is that he has a syndicated newspaper column and a regular gig as a commentator on MSNBC (your so called liberal media). The only place one should be able to find his rantings of should be on extreme fringe of hate group sites. He should be as welcomed as David Duke and yet he is strong voice on the Right and on our TeeVee.
I could provide many links to his bile, but I think his own site is the best example. Here, his latest call for a race war is posted next to the image of his latest book, Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”, an attack on Churchill and Britain and a defense–naturally–of Germany and Hitler.
The their report, Rage on the Right, the SPLC made the case about how hate speech moves from extreme groups to the mainstream:
As the movement has exploded, so has the reach of its ideas, aided and abetted by commentators and politicians in the ostensible mainstream. While in the 1990s, the movement got good reviews from a few lawmakers and talk-radio hosts, some of its central ideas today are being plugged by people with far larger audiences like FOX News’ Glenn Beck and U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn). Beck, for instance, re-popularized a key Patriot conspiracy theory — the charge that FEMA is secretly running concentration camps — before finally “debunking” it.
Last year also experienced levels of cross-pollination between different sectors of the radical right not seen in years. Nativist activists increasingly adopted the ideas of the Patriots; racist rants against Obama and others coursed through the Patriot movement; and conspiracy theories involving the government appeared in all kinds of right-wing venues.
Pat Buchanan has made a career out of actively moving extreme hate speech into the mainstream of our political discourse. It is clear that the election of a black President has set him over the edge. And so he is calling for a race war in in America as a way to celebrate CHM.
It would be amusing, if so many people weren’t buying it, but they are.
Cheers
dengre
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Pat Buchanan says what we’re all really thinking.
handy
He writes this:
And without missing a beat writes:
WTH?
Omnes Omnibus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I know your comment was snark, but I still have to call BS firmly and loudly.
Calouste
There’s a mistake in this post. It talks about some “Pat Buchanan”. Are you sure you don’t mean “noted Nazi-apologist Pat Buchanan”?
You wonder why a treasonous racist bastard like noted Nazi-apologist Pat Buchanan would be lined up with the neo-Confedaracy.
Dennis G.
@handy:
In Pat’s America you are either a Race Man or a Race Traitor. It is mighty white of him.
I just do not understand how this bitter fuckwad gets any respect, but then again, I guess Pat would mark me as Race Traitor.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Omnes Omnibus: quoting liberal MSNBC’s liberal Mika Brezinski, who serves as a liberal counterweight to independent conservative Joe Scarborough. ETA: She was explaining why Uncle Pat is her favorite pundit. Can’t forget that part.
beltane
What if they started a race war and no one showed up?
Pat Buchanan is a classic sower of discord. May the afterlife find him roaming his own circle of hell using his severed head as a lantern. (This is from Dante’s Inferno, a poem that should be updated to include today’s wingnuts)
Dennis G.
@Calouste:
Same guy. Although the description you offer is more fully accurate than simply using his name. And yet, being a Nazi-apologist is only one of his claims to fame. It is hard to capture a lifetime of hate in just a few words when describing Pat.
El Cid
So, slavery was all about electing Barack Obama? Man, Robert E. Lee was a brilliant stragedist.
Omnes Omnibus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I wonder how Zbig sleeps at night.
Of course, in Pat’s defense, he is a little less appalling than his sister.
beltane
I am quite sure that if the teabaggers initiated their action plan of pogroms and lynchings, the media would be right there behind them with the pom poms and megaphones. A race war would be terrific for ratings.
Dennis G.
@beltane:
This reminds me of the great Drive By Truckers song about George Wallace and his arriaval in Hell. Here is the link.
Cheers
Mike Kay
An armed man impersonating a police officer named McVay was arrested at the airport in Asheville, N.C., as President Barack Obama’s plane prepared to take off, authorities said. He told officers he wanted to see the president.
aolnews.com/nation/article/joseph-sean-mcvey-arrested-near-president-barack-obamas-plane/19453712
Gawd – this guy looks like Hinckley.
JGabriel
We’re not racist, because we don’t just hate blacks. We hate and women and maybe-gays too!
.
beltane
@JGabriel: Exactly. Notice how he fails to include John McCain, who is being teabagged from the right the same way Crist is.
JK
Speaking of Pat Buchanan, C-SPAN2 is featuring him this coming Sunday on its In Depth program from 12:00pm – 3:00pm.
h/t booktv.org/Program/11468/In+Depth+Pat+Buchanan.aspx
Get your questions ready now for the Nazi loving Confedracy loving son of a bitch.
Annie
Pat assumes that we only have one identity — our skin color. Maybe that is his only identity, but he certainly doesn’t describe the majority of Americans. In fact, quite the opposite, and that is what he can’t stand. He is using the teabaggers to try and return people to what he believes is most essential — that we return to a time when Americans were defined, both ethnically and legally, by their skin color.
He uses entitlements to strengthen his case, making people believe that entitlements are what blacks get, and whites pay for…Dismissing statistics that show that more whites receive welfare than blacks. That government handouts extend to all levels — both rich and poor, both black and white, and everything in-between. But, facts don’t fit his narrative…
beltane
@JK: Someone must ask him why it is that white supremacists are physically, intellectually, and morally inferior to just about everyone else. I would love to hear his answer.
robertdsc
And to think this is the same “Uncle Pat” that was steamrolled by then-Senator Obama’s DNC acceptance speech. I’ll always remember that.
arguingwithsignposts
What most amazes me about “Uncle Pat” is that he can maintain cordial relations with the likes of Hunter S. Thompson. I mean, WTF? Hunter! This dude should have been kicked to the curb in the worst way. I just do not get the Villager mentality.
Wag
Comrade Kevin
@robertdsc: Like Chris Matthews, he must have briefly forgotten Obama was Black.
geg6
Pat Buchanan may be the most evil and insidious of all the prominent racists of the right (and that is truly saying something). He is, no doubt about it, intelligent and not at all ignorant of reality. He is persuasive and is good at debate. He can be very funny and charming and can often seem reasonable and to be making trenchant arguments. He almost never froths at the mouth or goes off into strange and fantastical theories about the threads connecting completely unconnected things like a Limbaugh or a Beck. But he spews the most vitriolic hate in the most blunt terms of anyone given an honored place in the MSM. It is because he is all the attractive things that he is able to keep his place at the table with people like Rachel Maddow and Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw and what makes him so evil and dangerous. It is a disgrace that NBC and MSNBC allow such a person to appear on their shows and that the personalities they employ appear with him and even call him Uncle Pat, even if they imply that he’s Crazy Uncle Pat with that nickname. I cannot fathom that and have a hard time forgiving even Rachel for her part in validating him by her respect for him or for giving him any airtime at all.
It’s like the discussion at TNC’s today regarding the use of the Confederate battle flag by various groups of people and how it could just be a harmless symbol of rebellion and not necessarily racist in that context. That attitude that we should’t blame some people who use it for that purpose or excuse them because they are ignorant or uninformed just doesn’t fly with me. No one would accept that if it was a Nazi flag and not the battle flag of the Confederacy. And Pat Buchanan, a loud and proud apologist for both Nazis and traitorous black slave owners, is never harmless. Treating either as if they are legitimate in any way at any time dirties all who do, regardless of their good intentions. I simply refuse to do it and have little respect for those who do.
SGEW
Here’s a blast from the past from Pat, circa 2009:
That was in a column that, as far as I could tell, supports the current Chinese crackdown of the Uighur population in Xinjiang, or, at the very least, is “concerned” about the U.S.’s commitment to preserving the “blood and soil” of the “American people” from the “savage” “tribalism” of “diversity,” and “multiethnic” “elites.” All the while decrying “ethnonationalism”! Simply beyond the pale (as it were).
Link (Warning! Link goes to HumanEvents! Click at your own peril.)
Annie
@arguingwithsignposts:
He also calls himself a Christian. Somehow, Christianity is part of his “white” identity….In fact to him, his religion reinforces is primary identity, as does his love with those of European heritage…except the Jews, of course…They somehow don’t fit into his narrative of pure “whites,” nor pure Europeans…
Omnes Omnibus
@Annie: Yes, Christian in his terms seems to simply mean white, but not Jewish.
geg6
@Annie:
Well, he’s Catholic and if any Christian sect has a longer or more unsavory tradition of Nazi apologism, it would be the church of my youth. Even my mom, Super Catholic (as her kids called her behind her back) couldn’t rationalize that one away.
JK
How did Pat Buchanan’s father break his neck?
He fell out of a guard tower at Auschwitz.
JL
@JK:
FYI those C-Span show times are EST. And you can submit questions now via email. Follow JK’s link in comment #16.
Mike Kay
@JK: okay, I once saw someone ask him that on cSPAN, and he got pissed.
It was so funny, I had to rewind it a couple of times on my DVR – the joke and his reaction.
Ailuridae
How the Irish became White is worth a read here.
I can’t say I understand the history well (I’m a numbers guy through and through) but my understanding of ethnic groups that have recently been included into “White” is that they are the most vigilant about keeping other people out of “White”. And in the case of the Irish its been an ugly pattern that has extended years beyond when it should have. And there, you have Pat Buchanan.
demimondian
@Annie: But, Republican Jesus was white. We all know that — the Jews were turned beige as a part of the punishment for carrying Christ’s blood on their heads.
(And, lest you think I’m entirely bogus on that score, you should read the black history of Protestantism on the subject of teh Mark of Cain.)
mcd410x
DG, I’ve really enjoyed your posts on this. You and TNC have done a great job, in different ways.
Here’s the actual Stars and Bars mentioned in your post the other day. Educate *and* abuse, I say.
Thanks much
bootsy
From what I’ve seen of these Tea Baggers, these “new people,” they must be born at age 45 at least.
Pat: Please hurry up and die. Free up the Grand Wizard Robes for the Medicare-receiving youngsters celebrating Confederate History Month.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
Tribalism, the new dogwhistle.
Pat is right about how his kind see it; in their fevered minds it’s the White Tribe versus the Black Tribe. Just don’t call it what it is, which is racism. I knew that Obama winning would drive the cockroaches out into the open and sure as hell it has. Why are they scared? What could be setting them off?
For them, it’s truly Fear of a Black Nation. Their leaders are framing it as an US vs THEM fight, appealing to the very thing wingnuts love; issues that are simplified down to being either black or white. No gray area, no middle ground. Nice and easy to remember and parrot back to opponents.
When it comes to issues, you can’t get any blacker or whiter than the issue of how racists view others of color. Pat clearly understands that because he is one of the people who made the Southern Strategy work for Nixon and the Republican party. Why MSNBC has the asshole on is beyond me, I don’t know what he is supposed to be bringing to the table for them that couldn’t be done by someone who is less reprehensible.
Polar Bear Squares
I’ve been wondering why I can’t call him a racist. He is so unbelieveably proud to be one.
jamie d
Easy. Whites who don’t drink the kool-aid aren’t part of the “tribe”, and therefore can be targets of hate too; therefore, not racism, q.e.d.
argh.
kay
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal):
I’m sick to death of Americans who yearn back to their forebears with misty-eyed romanticism, and I’m sick to death of the ancestors of the people who left Europe using European ancestry as proof of superiority. If it was so fucking fabulous in Ye Olde Country maybe the Buchanans should have stayed there.
I could hazard a guess that the African Americans he’s talking about were here a hell of a lot earlier than the Buchanan Tribe. If we’re calling dibs on “American”, they have a prior claim.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Pat and Bay Buchanan are the same person.
Yutsano
It’s time for androgyny…oh wait.
In all seriousness, I stopped listening to Crazy Uncle Pat when the Right kept on embracing him even after espousing racist and neo-Nazi talking points. He is taken seriously by way too many people, which means he has connections in all the right
partiesplaces. Either that or he has so much dirt on too many folks to be dismissed.Mike in NC
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Yes, and they are scumbag motherfuckers.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Mike in NC:
I think he looks pretty good in that wig, all things considered.
Not quite Dame Edna level work, but respectable.
JK
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Pat Buchanan’s appearance on C-SPAN’s In Depth will be simulcast in German for Arizona viewers.
Yutsano
@ChockFullO’Nuts: No one shall EVER rise to the level of Dame Edna. It takes a ton of guts to still do a drag character in her fifties and still be entertaining. Notice the qualifier there.
kay
@jamie d:
Pat’s not assimilating. Oh, sure, he was doing okay when everyone he encountered looked like him, but he’s having a lot of difficulty now that they don’t.
Which is exactly the charge conservatives have been hurling at minorities for 100 years. That they can’t and won’t assimilate, and become more like Pat’s “tribe”. It’s time for him to do a little assimilating, and he’s resisting.
Why does he hate America? As it is, now? He only liked it when it looked like him? Minorities never made that a condition of their participating.
What a crybaby.
Lihtox
The scary thing is to go over to Amazon and see the comments on that book of his, “Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War”– the guy has a following who like to post on Amazon, clearly.
Oh and Pat?
1) Blacks aren’t united behind Obama because he’s black. They’re united behind Obama because the Republicans screw minorities over every chance they get. It’s hardly tribalist for black people to vote against the Confederacy.
2) This is one white boy who’s never going to join your little tribe, so you’ll have to deal with White America being divided. Boo hoo for you.
3) You’re in the running for the biggest disgrace to the Catholic Church, against some mighty competition. So that’s something to feel good about, I guess.
ChockFullO'Nuts
I am absolutely the biggest Barry Humphries fan in the world. The man is over 70 years old, bigger than me, probably around 230 lbs, prances around the stage for two hours in big high heels, does the most astounding one man show comic act in history, eight shows a week when I saw him a few years ago, keeps the audience on its knees laughing and gasping for breath the whole time, never utters a swear word, keeps up a running conversation with people in the audience the whole show, remembers their names, their kids’ names, what kind of cars they drive ….. it’s a tour de force. Amazing.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@JK:
Gemütliche!
GregB
Pat spent most of the 1980’s going to the mattresses to support then accused, now convicted Nazi death camp guard, John Demanjuk.
Yutsano
@ChockFullO’Nuts: And Australian, which just adds to the awesomeness. Did you know s/he has a show on Broadway now too? S/he isn’t going to stop any time soon.
Admit it, this is much better than discussing Pat and his
drag personasister.ChockFullO'Nuts
@GregB:
I think we are overlooking the Buchanan Inc. nature of the man’s work. He is an industry, a little money machine. Not to the Limbaugh level, although I am sure he would like to be.
He makes a living by pissing off people like us. I don’t think he believes half the shit he says. You can often see him basically laughing his ass off at us when he thinks nobody is looking, when he is doing the tv gigs.
The guy grew up in the Nixon White House, met and married his wife there. He understands the art of over the top political theater as well as anyone.
One of the things I hate him for is giving anti-Israel sentiment a bad name in this country. Because he is such an assiduous and outspoken critic of support for Israel, and because he plays around with anti-semitic rhetoric and views, he causes people to conflate opposition to Israel with anti-semitism, something very annoying to an Israel basher such as myself.
He’s called a “paleoconservative” by other pundits, and yet he is one of the more articulate pundit voices in opposition to America’s continually bellicose warmongering policies. He said this in 2000:
and this …
Buchanan is a fascinating guy, it’s a mistake to try to pigeonhole him.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Yutsano:
You mean, Bay and her male impersonation stage persona, Pat?
Heh.
Yutsano
@ChockFullO’Nuts: HA! You wins the thread good sir.
Elie
A person (or persons) being slowly asphyxiated flail their arms and legs and are quite active. Those are what are called “death throes”. In our overly smoothed out society where people dont die at home or in front of loved ones from beginning to end, we don’t know what that looks like, but believe me, this is what slow death looks like — active, flailing, scary — scary AND deeply sad.
Change has come and its is slowly cutting down the oxygen to these dysfunctional organs and vascular system of another time. Like one’s bad son-in-law who keeps running debt and has learned you are no longer going to bankroll him and keep his vascular system going — there is a moment of fear where you ask ” Is this guy going to try to hurt me to get this stuff”? So it is with these white supremacists and other right wing losers — they are bankrupt, their theories are bankrupt, their ideas and most importantly, their morals and spirit are bankrupt. Nothing more dangerous — ever. They are full out dangerous because they have nothing left. We have to plan a national intervention that will bring the “brother Clems” back to sanity without him bringing all Clem’s violent anger and fear — death throes — first — not easy to do.
Dollared
@DennisG,
The Drive by Truckers thing is a thing of beauty. Thanks for that.
Sly
Whenever I need an refresher course in how early 20th century elites used the language of white nationalism to co-opt the political loyalty of working-class European immigrants and their posterity, who said elites didn’t even consider to be actually white in the manner in which we now use the term, I turn to Pat Buchanan.
He’s not just a racist. He’s from a long and proud history of racists who spat on black and brown people to make their WASP overlords smile. He’s a step above the poor whites that plantation owners used to pay to hunt down runaway slaves, giving them scraps from the table in a cynical (and effective) ploy to offset centuries of a depressed wage base.
LesGS
Hmm. If Buchanan’s “new people” are the Tea Partiers, a huge percentage of them, if female, are post-menopausal. So nothing new is generating in those wombs. If they are male, Sarah Palin may be producing belabored star-bursts, but kleenex and tube-socks are pretty much dead-ends, as far as wombs, white or otherwise, go.
The *actual* “new-people” recently produced by “white wombs,” if you’re speaking of young voting adults, are predominantly Obama supporters. Their “tribe” has little to do with the color of their skin. (Though many are conscious that we are still working through racial issues.) And Buchanan and his ilk are irrelevant and dead, dead, dead to them.
Les, speaking as the (white) parent of (white) 21 and 18 year olds…
Yutsano
Test
Little Dreamer
You know, every once in a while Pat says something that makes a lot of sense to me, and I loathe him when he does it, because I know that he’s unhinged and I wish he’d just go all out and stay there. I can’t handle it when he makes me think that the hinge might actually be worth repairing for a short while before he goes off half cocked and reminds again me that the hinge is really just held together with bobby pins and tape.
FY Pat Buchanan!
And FWIW, a bunch of white people voted for and supported that black man too (we’re not afraid of the color of someone’s skin). If the African Americans had tried to elect him all on their own, you’d be looking at a different white house. It took the effort of people of different colors coming together, including a bunch of us whities who believe in a real democracy!
What a jerk.
Little Dreamer
@Elie:
That may be true, but some people take a long time to die. Those right-wingers are going to be around a long time (and they will not be changing their ideology anytime soon). The best we can hope for is that they eventually realize how embarrassing they have become and just decide to stick a sock in it for a while.
Panurge
They may be dying now, but, gosh darn it, they kept those hippies from taking over! ;-/ I’m sure that’ll provide some comfort for them.
It’s probably just me, but I suspect the people right-wingers actually hate the most (as opposed to assigning a particular place in the social pecking order) are white people who won’t “assimilate”. We could be one of Us, but we freely choose not to be, which makes us Them. IOW, they even want to dictate what it means to be White (and, of course, male).
Mark S.
@Little Dreamer:
Pat is actually an interesting read on foreign policy; he’s pretty isolationist but it’s nice to occasionally read someone who isn’t of the Thomas Friedman school of America Can Invade Any Country It Likes. Once I found Larison, I didn’t really find a need to read Buchanan on that anymore.
But Pat is such an unreconstructed racist I can’t believe he’s on TV, especially after he wrote a book arguing that Hitler was really a peaceful guy.
Anne Laurie
@JK:
No, seriously, it was his mother who was the Good German… a fact “Uncle Pat” could not stop bragging about in his 1970s-era autobiography. Buchanan has the (insufficient) excuse of having grown up in an era (my father’s) where a mean Irish-American Catholic drunk who married a German-American Catholic (with a history of untreated depressive episodes) was considered to have married up. Like Nixon — who was also “Scots Irish”, I’m ashamed to admit — Buchanan used his natural combative talents, as the saying went, to achieve a position in the Prescott Bush wing of the Republican Party whose natural-born members considered them both one half-step above “the coloreds”, the Democrats, and the rest of the untermenschen. As Ailuridae and Sly said earlier, there’s a long and prickly history of not-quite-“white”-enough ethnics feverishly grabbing the chance to play foreman or overseer to abuse their fellow laborers for a few extra scraps of pay or pride from the masters’ banquet. But Buchanan, unlike Nixon, was always self-aware enough to appreciate his status as Jack Ketch did not entitle him to sit above the salt with such natural aristocratic luminaries as George H.W. Bush or the other Ivy League Legacy Boys. He was — is — the Republican’s human pit bull, and has aged into a “paleoconservative” emeritus status where he’s considered cute & cuddly because he’s been “almost a part of the family” beyond the modern Media Village Idiot living memory (i.e., pre-the-last-two-election cycles). But as with any four-legged pit bull, the fact that Buchanan’s put on some weight and lost a little of his automatic impulse to chomp down on anything that crosses his peripheral vision doesn’t mean a sensible individual would trust him off-leash around young people, bicyclists, or the other household pets.
Splitting Image
No, that’s exactly right, and you can see it even more clearly with gays and lesbians.
People born that way? Wingnuts can be sympathetic to that. The poor sinners can’t help themselves.
But if you’re heterosexual and “the gays” don’t bother you? They’ll hate you ’til your dying day. That’s why the worst sin is to be a straight male and carry a purse. Or wear pink. It eats away at their souls to see you do something they’ve defined as gay and not be ashamed of it.
Some other guy
Some pearls of hate from Pat’s fevered mind.
We’re going to bring back God and the Bible and drive the gods of secular humanism right out of the public schools of America.
— Pat Buchanan, campaign address at an anti-gay rally in Des Moines, Iowa, February 11, 1996
Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free.
— Pat Buchanan, speaking before the Christian Coalition in 1993
Homosexuality involves sexual acts most men consider not only immoral, but filthy. The reason public men rarely say aloud what most say privately is they are fearful of being branded “bigots” by an intolerant liberal orthodoxy that holds, against all evidence and experience, that homosexuality is a normal, healthy lifestyle.
— Pat Buchanan, September 3, 1989
Homosexuality is not a civil right. Its rise almost always is accompanied, as in the Weimar Republic, with a decay of society and a collapse of its basic cinder block, the family.
— Pat Buchanan, 1977
Gay rights activists seek to substitute, for laws rooted in JudeoChristian morality, laws rooted in the secular humanist belief that all consensual sexual acts are morally equal. That belief is anti-biblical and amoral; to codify it into law is to codify a lie.
— Pat Buchanan, Wall Street Journal, January 21, 199
The poor homosexuals — they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution.
— Pat Buchanan, discussing AIDS in 1983
With 80,000 dead of AIDS, our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide.
— Pat Buchanan, in his syndicated column, October 17, 1990
AIDS is nature’s retribution for violating the laws of nature.
— Pat Buchanan, during his 1992 presidential campaign
Racial Intolerance
The War Between the States was about independence, about self-determination, about the right of a people to break free of a government to which they could no longer give allegiance. How long is this endless groveling before every cry of “racism” going to continue before the whole country collectively throws up?
— Pat Buchanan, accusing someone of “putting on an act” by associating the Confederacy with slavery, July 28, 1993
There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The “negroes” of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours.
— Pat Buchanan, when discussing race relations in the 1950s, in Right from the Beginning, Buchanan’s 1988 autobiography
We were among Hoover’s conduits to the American people,
— Pat Buchanan, who was caught publishing FBI anti-Martin Luther King Jr. propaganda as his own editorials in the St Louis Globe Democrat in the mid-1960s, in Right from the Beginning, Buchanan’s 1988 autobiography
[For President Nixon to visit King’s widow on the anniversary of King’s assassination because it would] outrage many, many people who believe Dr. King was a fraud and a demagogue and perhaps worse…. Others consider him the Devil incarnate. Dr. King is one of the most divisive men in contemporary history.
— Pat Buchanan, while working as a White House adviser to Nixon, reported in the New York Daily News, October 1, 1990
Take a hard look at [KKK leader David] Duke’s portfolio of winning issues and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles [such as] reverse discrimination against white folks.
— Pat Buchanan, February 25, 1989
There is nothing wrong with us sitting down and arguing that issue that we are a European country.
— Pat Buchanan, Newsday, November 15, 1992
How, then, can the feds justify favoring sons of Hispanics over sons of white Americans who fought in World War II or Vietnam?
— Pat Buchanan, discussing affirmative action, January 23, 1995
An across-the-board assault on our Anglo-American heritage.
— Pat Buchanan, describing multiculturalism, when speaking before the Christian Coalition in 1993
Antisemitism
Israeli-occupied territory.
— Pat Buchanan, describing Washington, DC, when discussing Jewish influence in US government, St Louis Post Dispatch, October 20, 1990, quoted from Political Amazon’s “Quotes from Hell”
[Despite Hitler’s anti-Semitic and genocidal tendencies, he was] an individual of great courage…. Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.
— Pat Buchanan, in a 1977 column, The Guardian, January 14, 1992
Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody.
— Pat Buchanan, expressing his revisionist views, challenging the fact that diesel exhaust was used to gas thousands of Jews at Treblinka, and discussing “group fantasies of martyrdom” in The New Republic, October 22, 1990
It’s running down 70-year-old camp guards.
— Pat Buchanan, in The New York Times, discussing his attempts at closing down the US Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (which was in charge of prosecuting Nazi war criminals) April 21, 1987
Gynophobia
Rail as they will about “discrimination,” women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism.
— Pat Buchanan, November 22, 1983
The real liberators of American women were not the feminist noise-makers, they were the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the freezer.
— Pat Buchanan, Right from the Beginning
If a woman has come to believe that divorce is the answer to every difficult marriage, that career comes before children … no democratic government can impose another set of values upon her.
— Pat Buchanan, Right from the Beginning
Anti-Democracy
Like all idolatries, democratism substitutes a false god for the real, a love of process for a love of country.
— Pat Buchanan, 1990
You just wait until 1996, then you’ll see a real right-wing tyrant.
— Pat Buchanan, just before he announced his candidacy for the 1996 presidential election in 1995
slightly_peeved
I wouldn’t say it’s just you, or that it’s just this case. The heretic is always a greater danger than the heathen.
El Cid
I think that this
explains a lot of the ordinary level and Southern white resentment of Bill Clinton — he wasn’t playing the angry white male subtle racist cultural reactionary game.
Interestingly, this popular opposition (ever a minority any way) declined after the Lewinsky scandal erupted, I’m guessing because there was at least some grudging admiration that the President was a good old fashioned horny toad.
Malron
Apparently no one notices the GOP/Tea Party/Palin post-election game plan is eerily similar to the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898.
The Endless Sheriff
Question: What if Pat has a point? What if the Teabaggers are the early edition of our very own home-grown xenophobic political party—a bunch of European countries have them. No reason to think we will be immune. What if the Aryan Nation has broken out into the mainstream? What if Phoenix becomes the ‘national’ capital of this new white tribe?
With the country due to become a minority-majority (or is it majority-minority?) country soon, it’s almost certain that some goodly portion of the population isn’t going to handle it very well. I say that because of my experience teaching high school in white bread Iowa for twenty years. I see no death throes for xenophobia/tribalism/racism/racial hysteria…whatever you want to call it.
Do we have a political strategy to handle them?
aimai
@robertdsc:
So true, robertdsc! Rachel Maddow had to calm him down he was so overwhelmed. I think it was one part honest human admiration and one part jealousy, but he was moved, against his will, almost to tears.
aimai
aimai
@Anne Laurie:
Oh my god, annie laurie, FTMFW.
aimai
Honus
@LesGS: as the father of 19 and 20 year old sons, you are absolutely right. Pretty much nobody under 50 buys that racist dog whistle stuff anymore, and most people under 40 are revolted by it. I felt that was the case in 2008 and waited to see if the election proved me right. It did; Obama became the first democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to carry Virginia. It’s only going to get more evident every election, as the younger post-racial voters come to dominate the electorate.
Annie
@demimondian:
What to say….
cheers, little beige Annie
BlackMage
Pat Buchanan, in 1996, won the New Hampshire primary.
If he’d gotten a few hundred more votes a few weeks before, he would have won the Iowa caucuses.
Had he won the Iowa caucuses, it’s very, very possible he’d have been the Republican nominee for President.
So 14 years ago, the GOP very nearly nominated Pat Buchanan, an unrepentent racist troglodyte whose only qualification for the office was his unrelenting hatred of the 20th century, for President of the United States.
Never forget this.
scav
–
OK? We’ll go back to your little utopia. Only we swap.
Right.
Linda Featheringill
Many years ago, Pat ran for the Republican nomination for President.
At that time, his position on a lot of issues were VERY CLOSE to fascism. Maybe fascism with a few modifiers. He probably was innocent of violent racism. I don’t think he ever proposed killing off people who weren’t Irish Catholics.
But he still dances with fascism. Moving in, stepping back, moving in . . . . . Cha, cha, cha!
Dennis G.
@Malron:
That was a traditional American riot–gangs of white folks killing people of color. I bet Pat wishes he could have been there. I bet he longs for a return to those kinds of displays of white power.
Cheers
asiangrrlMN
Oooh oooh oooh! #Waves hand wildly# I have a question, Mr. Buchanan! What the fuck is my side in all this, you crazy, angry, repugnant racist bastard you?
Wilson Heath
Pat isn’t just a racist. He’s a reverse-civil-rights leader. (Thanks, Colbert!) vodpod.com/watch/1934680-colbert-reverse-racism
ricky
Neo-confederates? What’s new about this? Pat don’t know nothing about gestatin new wite folk movements, Miss Scarlett, just stokin the same old hate.
Kirk Spencer
@The Endless Sheriff:
It’s where one of our perennial problems becomes an advantage.
The way we’re set up, we are a defacto two party nation. We’re not a parliament where all parties get ‘some’ voice.
This, then, is the control. The Xeno party is a minority. It can attempt (and even succeed) in becoming a dominant voice in a party, but as it does so it will drive many to the ‘other’ party. In gaining control it will guarantee remaining the minority.
They will always have a voice. They’re loud, and squeaky wheels get noticed. But in the end, they’re just a squeaky wheel.
El Cid
@Malron: I’ve been mentioning that and the other late 1890’s “Redeemer” strategies of violent yahoos and terrorist paramilitaries drawn up by wealthy planter elites to regain power.
PTirebiter
@Anne Laurie: “But Buchanan, unlike Nixon, was always self-aware enough to appreciate his status as Jack Ketch did not entitle him to sit above the salt…” It’s stuff like this that keeps me addicted to this blog. I wonder if Fitzgerald was commenting on more than just money when he wrote about the rich being different?
El Cid
Pat Buchannan is mostly a fan of the Catholic fascist Franco, but I don’t think Franco wrote a lot about segregation in the U.S.; if he had, Uncle Pat might have made sure to mention him in every single sentence he spoke.
LuciaMia
And now, of course, the wingnuts are calling the Southern Poverty Law Center a ‘hate group.’
Poor old Germany. Being practically forced into waging wide-scale war and implementing the Holocaust.
Brutus et tu
@ChockFullO’Nuts: Pat’s same idea that the US troops over there causes more trouble, is the exact same rationale he uses to make his implicit suggestion of separate countries for each race. He doesn’t think even slightly different cultures/ethnic backgrounds can live together. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
dopey-o
i grew up reading the st louis globe democrat in the 60s, and i remember the ‘click’ moment when i realized that most of their editorials were hysterical screeds intended to scare little old ladies of both sexes into a rabid fear of unions and negroes and anti-war activists.
years later, when i learned that buchanan wrote many of the editorials, it all made sense in a sick way.
somehow, it’s an amazing display of consistency in a world that has changed so radically.
elmo
@PTirebiter:
I know. Awesome stuff. “Sit above the salt” is an expression I hadn’t ever heard before, and I love it.
kid bitzer
pat does have a point, though. it’s outrageous to call the nazis anti-semites, given how many gypsies they gassed, too.
“anti-semites? you take that back! look at our record: we didn’t just kill jews; we also killed every fag we could find, as well as everyone we labeled mentally deficient, and pretty much just everyone we considered sub-human. it makes me so mad when people play the anti-semitism card!”
so i for one think it is just ad outrageous to call the tea-hadists “racist” as it is to call the nazis “anti-semitic”. they hate fags, too! and immigrants! and women who don’t know their place! how can you call them racists?
PTirebiter
@elmo: Yea, I think it had to do with hierarchy and who set where at the table. I’m sure my family would have been below the sink, as opposed to just being below the salt.
Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
@demimondian: Can you elaborate?
different church-lady
Every time a pundit attributes Scott Brown’s victory over Coakley to the Tea Party, I smile a little. Being in Massachusetts, I know better. I also know that this is a weakness in their ramparts.
different church-lady
@kid bitzer:
They also seem to hate anyone with an IQ over 80. Is there a word for that?
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Brutus et tu:
You could be right. One thing about Pat for me is that even after all these years of reading him (on antiwar.com mostly) and listening to him on tv, I still can’t tell what he really believes and what he is just saying for hire or to sell his own books.
Either way, I think he likes to play a basically dangerous but effective game, namely, flirting with the worst angels in his audience and then being “outraged” when another audience calls him a racist. He thinks, at that point, that he has won. He has won the approval of the people with the pitchforks, and made them feel crapped on by the other audience that calls him, and them by proxy, racists.
It’s all a manipulation designed to drum up agita in that so-called populist base. Get us to insult them by castigating him. It’s the same thing Limbaugh does.
Whether he himself actually believes anything doesn’t matter, as long as he pulls off that “let’s you and him fight” routine so well. Playing groups against each other, pure Nixonian stuff. Which is where he came from.
different church-lady
Isn’t that from Lord of the Rings?
different church-lady
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Hell, isn’t he the guy who taught Nixon the craft?
frankdawg
After writing this I realized it contains some pretty inflammatory language – I apologize but this sheet-wearing Nazi has me in a spittle-flecked mood! The choice of words is meant to be offensive, as offensive as Pat.
I always find Patty’s claim of a unified Christianity somewhat puzzling. I remember hearing him talk one time (may have been that run for Prez) about how he & his brothers used to beat up Protestants because they were not Catholics (I forget his actual excuse but that is what it boiled down to).
Having grown up Protestant in a Catholic town, having been beaten up on my way home from Sunday school by some bead-rattelin-soms-a-bitches I never felt there was a ‘Christian identity’. Patty would like to forget that KKK stood for Koons, Kikes & Kat-o-licks. But my guess is if those bastards ever did rise again they would remind him & Patty would come running to us to save his useless ass from his white friends.
AxelFoley
lolwut?
ChockFullO'Nuts
@different church-lady:
Well, Nixon was an artful manipulator from way back. He weaseled his way into congress in the 1940’s by playing on anti-communist fears.
Playing on resentment against civil rights was just another version of the same game, I thought at the time.
ruemara
@demimondian:
Ah, Mark of Cain. At least 35% of why I left fundy christianity almost a decade ago. Good times…wait, no, bad times, bad times.
jake the snake
If Pat gets his “
race warcultural and tribal” war, put me down on the side of Nat Turner rather than Earl Turner.clay
Hmm… Shorter Pat Buchanan:
The KlanTeapartiers aren’t racist because they don’t just hate n*ggers, they also hate n*gger-lovers.AxelFoley
@robertdsc:
Exactly.
Anne Laurie
@Malron:
Chilling. Especially since Karl Rove, during the early days of the Cheney Regency, spoke longingly of his team’s desire to return to the “golden days” of McKinley’s presidency. At least we avoided that horror… and I sure as hell don’t see President Obama treating a modern version of this insurrection as a “(white) boys will be boys” event.
Panurge
@Anne Laurie:
Personally, I think we all know how any replay of such as Wilmington/Tulsa/Rosewood would be met. The fire THIS time, white boy! (Maybe that’s why it hasn’t happened lately.)
WereBear
As always, when I hear some pathetic bunch of idiots claiming an inherent superiority, I want to ask, “So, why aren’t you?”
Panurge
@Splitting Image:
Thanks!
You can compare this to the “we’re just like you, we just happen to be gay” theme. What that means is “We’re as square as you.” Because they’ve been told (apparently by Andrew Sullivan) that they need to be square (i.e., like the people who are repressing them) to be accepted by the mainstream and be first-class citizens. So bisexuals with a freaky streak (like moi) get thrown under the bus. When I read complaints from gays about being thrown under the bus, it’s hard for me to be sympathetic.
slippy
@ChockFullO’Nuts: I refuse to give intellectual credit to someone who so consistently acts like a fucking moron.
Pat may be an intelligent human being. But since he refuses to act like one, I assume he’s a clodhopper stupid fuckwit who is beneath my contempt. Fuck him sideways.